


a daft and dewy-eyed dope

by Jade_Sabre



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Kid Fic, Secret Children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-07
Updated: 2018-11-07
Packaged: 2019-08-09 20:46:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16456937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jade_Sabre/pseuds/Jade_Sabre
Summary: Kaidan receives orders to go to Arcturus Station and pick up an unexpected package.  Set in between ME1 and ME2.





	a daft and dewy-eyed dope

**Author's Note:**

> I was going through old fics on my hard drive and discovered this little AU, of which there will probably not be any more, but in reading it I just felt so fond of Kaidan that I felt a need to share.
> 
> Title from Rodgers and Hammerstein, because why not.

Kaidan wasn’t sure why he’d been summoned out to Arcturus Station.  Sure, he was coming up for promotion soon, but lieutenant commander usually didn’t require a personal interview with any admirals.  He hadn’t made a peep about the Reapers after his initial post-Alchera counseling, so it wasn’t for some sort of high-level chastisement, and he certainly hadn’t had any psychotic breakdowns, though his post-Alchera counselor had treated him as though she thought he would destroy her office at any moment.  He’d been quiet, kept his head down, refused to talk about his time about the _Normandy_ , and there wasn’t a damn reason he could think of to call him away from shore leave to visit the leader of the Fifth Fleet.

It was July.  He didn’t want to be in space in July.  He’d carefully planned his leave so that he could keep both feet firmly on the ground (and preferably a beer in his hand, if not a scotch) somewhere warm (or Vancouver, close enough), far away from anyone or anything who might associate him with the anniversary of the worst day of his life.  He’d done what they asked of him in every regard, reorganized the careful compartments in his head, only opened the doors when he had time to process what lay behind them; it wasn’t like he was new to trauma, or disappointment, or heartbreak.  He knew how to handle it—or how _not_ to handle it, anyway—and all he wanted was a moment to do so.

But the military waited for no man, and the order had come under the highest security he had clearance for, and so he’d gotten on the shuttle up to the Alliance base on the Moon (and avoided memories of long-deactivated VIs) and taken the lift to the small cruiser heading for the station.  Once aboard he’d sealed himself inside a sleeper pod and told the regulators he didn’t want to wake until they reached their destination.  When the programming protested, he fed it his own protocols and settled in for a blissfully unconscious ride.

Arcturus Station itself was _huge_ , but as soon as he arrived an aide greeted him and led him through the maze of hallways—much brighter than those on Jump Zero had been, if just as sterile—up elevators and through so many security checkpoints the amp in the back of his head buzzed in protest.  He kept the wince from his face and pinched the bridge of his nose as the aide entered an access code for an impressively large door, dropping his hand as the door pinged and slid open to reveal an ornately updated conference room.  The polished wood of the table, out of place anywhere else on the station, here stood reflecting the light of actual lamps hanging from the ceiling, an intricately patterned rug below its feet and a no-doubt-impressive view of the surrounding star system out the large window.

Admiral Steven Hackett blocked part of the view, standing at the head of the table with his head bowed over a report.  An N7 general whom Kaidan didn’t recognize, his nametag reading Blitzen, stood on one side while two civilians, a doctor and a pilot, maybe, stood on the other, peering intently at some sort of carrier and occasionally poking its contents.  Kaidan came to the foot of the table and snapped a salute as the aide cleared her throat and said, “Admiral?”

Hackett looked up.  “Dismissed.  Lieutenant Alenko, at ease.”  He waited until the door closed behind the aide and sighed.  “I appreciate your coming on such short notice, lieutenant.”

“Sir,” Kaidan said, still standing at attention.  He couldn’t decipher the expression on Hackett’s face as the admiral stared at him, but it lasted for much longer than he would have expected.  His heart would have sunk, but he couldn’t think of anything worse than what had already happened to him.  So he waited, and tried not to resent the silence.

Hackett finally shook his head and said, “I,” and then stopped again and glanced at Blitzen, who shrugged.  He looked back to the lieutenant and said, “I’m not sure—”

The carrier gave forth a hiccupped cry, and in response the pilot reached in and withdrew a pile of blankets.  Both Hackett and Blitzen looked at it with more apprehension than Kaidan suspected it warranted, and as the pilot lifted the pile of blankets to her shoulder he spotted the pinkish head belonging to its occupant.

“She’s probably hungry,” the doctor said.  “What did you do with the formula?”

“It’s still going through decon,” Hackett said with a look that suggested if the man had had children, he’d spent their babyhoods on tour.  “I ordered full chemical spectrums of the bag and its contents.”

The civilians exchanged a look.  “Well, we’ve been feeding it to her for a week, so I don’t think poison,” the woman said, rubbing the baby’s back.  “And if she doesn’t get fed she’ll keep crying, and I know how much you brass hate a crying baby.”

Blitzen reached into a pocket and withdrew a bag of white powder.  Hackett glowered at him as he passed it to the doctor, who took it over to a coffee maker Kaidan could just make out on a counter in his periphery.  The N7 glowered back.  “Always be prepared.”

Hackett shook his head and caught sight of Kaidan again as he did so.  “Ah.  Lieutenant.”  He cleared his throat, looked at the baby, looked back at Kaidan, and then to Blitzen, who shook his head and held his hands up in a very un-N7 gesture of non-engagement.

“Is he the father?” the woman asked, clucking her tongue as the baby fussed again.

Kaidan’s body didn’t move an inch, though the question passed through him with all the force of—a biotic shockwave, Hackett’s somewhat guilty gaze a warp reversing the gravity of his tightly contained universe.  “I suppose congratulations are in order,” Hackett said, and he could almost feel his atoms rearranging.

He blinked.  “Sir?”

“The baby,” Hackett said.  “Er—she doesn’t have a name.  We were waiting on you.”

The man came back with the bottle of formula and took the baby, sticking the bottle in its—her?—mouth while the woman crossed her arms and studied him.  Kaidan finally broke his stance in order to return the look, then went back to Hackett.  “Sir?” he said again.

“You’re a father,” Blitzen said. 

“According to all the genetic tests,” the doctor added, shifting his weight back and forth as the contents of the bottle slowly disappeared.  “I ran them three times.”

“She was part of a pickup,” the pilot said.  “We were doing a normal run, Citadel to Arcturus, and someone left her in my ship with instructions to take her to the Alliance.  Security vids were wiped and the blackbox only noted that a human male brought her aboard.”

Kaidan felt a headache—a normal headache, normally a welcome change—building behind his eyes.  “I don’t understand,” he said finally.

“Neither do I, Alenko,” Hackett said.  “We’re still trying to piece together what we know.”

“We know they got past the genetic scanners—” the N7 began.

“The ones on the _Lucky Scrape_ are two generations old, they’re easily hacked,” the pilot said.  “Not usually a problem because I run a legitimate business _and_ the hack is usually easily traced.”

“They picked you specifically and focused on your scanners,” Blitzen said.  “They knew your supply run and wanted her to end up here.”

“She’s three months old,” the doctor said.  “Approximately.  Healthy.  Alert.  Probable biotic—won’t manifest for several years—but with no traces of any significant gene therapy, aside from childhood disease immunities.”

“We’ve been through this several times,” Hackett said, almost an aside.  “And eventually I determined that if—whoever it is—wants her with the Alliance, then I could at least make sure she was with family.”

“And that’s you,” the doctor said again.

“That’s impossible,” Kaidan said, slamming the doors shut on any calculations his too-literal mind wanted to make.

The N7 snorted.  “If it’s fraternization you’re worried about, don’t be.  We’ve got bigger fish at this point.”

Kaidan froze, staring at an insignia on Hackett’s chest.  The admiral winced.  “We’re not making any assumptions—”

“Shepard?”  The name escaped him—he hadn’t said it since—and now he called her, as if somehow she could call back from beyond the grave.  He was a fool, twice so for sending a lover’s sigh in front of a man who could demote him down to Basic without thinking about it.  But he loved her—he strained to keep the bulkheads closed—and he couldn’t help—the impossibility—

“Her mitochondrial DNA does match—”

“We don’t know,” Hackett interrupted, though the doctor’s expression clearly disagreed.  “We don’t know anything for sure.”

“And even if we did,” Blitzen said, “we wouldn’t tell you anyway.”

He barely kept his corona from flaring, and the resulting feedback spiked pain through his head; he let the wince become a glare.  “Is she—”

“We don’t know,” Hackett said again, “and what we do know doesn’t look good.  And the only reason I’m saying that much is that I’m giving you the best proof we have.”

“Giving—”

“You’re the father,” the doctor said, settling the bottle on the table as he shifted the baby up against his shoulder.  “She’s your daughter.”

The word hit him as hard as—as the first one did, a lift/slam combination that left him reeling.  Words he’d thought about—daydreamt about—hoped maybe one day—ignored—

“This is your primary mission,” Hackett said.  “You’ll still be active duty, but she is to be with family at all times.  I understand both your parents are still living?  If you can come to an acceptable arrangement with them I’ll allow for your deployment, but in the meantime your orders are to take care of her.  We still don’t know if whoever sent her plans to come back—”

“Permission to speak freely, sir?” he said.

Hackett’s expression pinched.  “Granted.”

“What the hell am I going to do with a baby, sir?” he said.  “And how in the hell did it get here if—”

“We don’t know, lieutenant,” Blitzen said.  “Look, I trained Shepard, and I know if anyone could survive getting spaced, she could—”

“We all know that,” Hackett said, glancing at the civilians, both of whom had a closed, studiously ignorant expression on their face, “but we have no proof.”

“Other than a—”  Kaidan looked to the doctor again.

The doctor misunderstood the look.  “Would you like to hold her?”

A resounding _no_ echoed against all the wildest hopes of his heart, and while his face fixed itself in an uncomfortable confused contortion the doctor arranged his arms and placed the warm pile of blankets in his arms and while his internal organs argued with themselves innate human curiosity won out, and he looked down.

She was a face, a bleary-eyed little round-cheeked face haloed with blankets, the soft layer of red hair clashing with the pink of her skin, and he couldn’t place the nose and the eyes weren’t any blue he recognized but their shape was his, _his_ , and she had her mother’s hair and his eyes and she kicked her feet inside her blankets and she had _feet_ and the whole of her fit in his two arms cradled together and she was impossibly small and warm and solid and impossibly _real_ and _impossible_ , and for a moment he hated her for everything she wasn’t, everything dangled out of his reach forever and yet _here in his arms_ —

Her eyes focused on him, blinking, unsure, studying him with an intense concentration, and then her face wrinkled up and she made an alarming sound and the doctor swept her back up, leaving Kaidan’s arms immeasurably empty.

“She just needs to burp,” the doctor reassured him, patting the baby’s back.  “It’s not hard once you get the hang of it.”

He was vaguely aware of his words, as he was of Hackett saying, “Well, lieutenant?” in an expectant voice, but mostly he was consumed by the view of the back of a little pink head with red hair, impossible and heartbreaking and—and _his_ , his and—his alone. 

His head ached with contradictions and barely-contained floods; he nodded, short and tight, and Hackett said, “Good.  I’ve arranged quarters here for you through the end of the week—the doctor will teach you what you need to know before you’re released on shore leave.  I’ll contact you once I’ve determined your return vessel.  In the meantime—” the baby burped, and the doctor settled her back in Kaidan’s arms.  Hackett looked at him once more, and then said, “Good luck.”

Kaidan clicked his heels together and nodded, unable to give a proper salute, and the nod left him looking at his—at the baby, and he was barely aware of Hackett’s dismissal, or the doctor taking his elbow and guiding him out of the room and towards the nearest lift.  He didn’t know what to do with the little face with its smacking lips and sleepy eyes other than keep holding it, warm against his chest like her—it wasn’t fair, it was _impossible_ —

“So,” the doctor said, his voice unnaturally loud in the senseless silence, “have you thought of a name?”

A name.  He didn’t know—he had no experience with—something quick, something easy, something to remind him of—a girl, a girl’s name—

“Sally,” he said, looking down as her eyes closed into sleep, the name simple on his tongue and strange in his ears, stranger in the cavernous places in his heart he thought he’d closed away.  “Sally Jane.”

“Sally Alenko?” the doctor said, and the dubious note in his voice disappeared beneath the pounding rush in Kaidan’s head.  “Has a nice—”

“Sally,” he repeated, and breath puffed between her lips, _alive_ and _his_ , and he was sunk.


End file.
